"An exhibition about an exhibition" is an engaging format for both audiences and art historians, if only because it is so rarely encountered in galleries. More than sixty years later, through the exhibition In Spite of the Ban, the curators recall the legendary showcase of works by Mikuláš Medek and Jan Koblasa held in Teplice in August 1963. The impulse was the unexpected discovery of its photographic documentation, captured by photographer Jiří Hampl. His images have preserved to this day the grandeur of an exhibition that helped open the floodgates for non-figurative, subjectively focused art persecuted and forbidden by communist ideology. With characteristic courage, both artists presented abstract, predominantly existentially tuned large-format works from the years 1959 to 1963. In a Czech modern art scene plagued by bans and dictates, they caused a literal revolution—the exhibition became a "turning point" in the development of contemporary Czechoslovak modern art. The book is published in a bilingual Czech-English edition.
First Czech edition, col. illus., 120 pp., Prague – Artefactum 2026
ISBN 978-80-530-1824-1
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